Hees will be succeeded at Burger King by current CFO Daniel Schwartz, another 3G partner, who is immediately being moved up a rung at the burger chain to chief operating officer until the CEO change is made.

The CEO change at Burger King will happen on July 1, unless the Heinz deal closes earlier. The deal is expected to close late in the second quarter or in the third quarter. Antritrust clearance has already been granted in most countries.

Hees will remain involved at Burger King as a vice chairman, the company said, and will remain as part of its executive committee.

3G and Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy Heinz for $23 billion nearly two months ago, adding to both investors’ stable of consumer products. The Brazilian firm was founded by a trio of businessmen who built a fortune in beer and control Anheuser-Busch InBev. They had made a splash by scooping up Burger King for $4.1 billion in October 2010. They then struck a deal to take a portion of the company public in 2012, selling a 29% stake for $1.4 billion.

Both deals gave him lucrative preferred shares that have since been repurchased and warrants to buy millions in stock.

In Goldman, Berkshire Hathaway got $5 billion in preferred shares and warrants to buy $5 billion of common shares at $115. Those are the warrants Goldman announced it was restructuring today, putting Berkshire in line to get around 2% of Goldman’s stock, among the investment bank’s Top 10 holders.

Apparently Goldman followed the lead of GE this time around.

GE’s latest 10-K said it reached a deal with Berkshire in January that’s essentially identical to the Goldman one announced today, swapping the gains on the warrants for equity in GE.

Berkshire had warrants to buy $3 billion of common shares at $22.25 in GE. GE’s shares closed yesterday at $23.24, meaning Berkshire is currently in line for a GE stake of less that 0.1%.

As Buffett noted today in his press release, he met Sydney Weinberg, the legendary head of Goldman in the post-depression era, when Buffett was a young lad of 10.

The story is recounted in the noted biography of Buffett, Snowball, by Alice Schroeder, who writes that the meeting happened when Buffett’s father, Howard, took him to New York for a trip. Buffett told his father he wanted to visit three places, a stamp and coin company, a model train company and Wall Street.

So his father, a broker, stopped in to meet Weinberg, who the book says he hadn’t met before. Buffett said in the book the meeting lasted about 30 minutes, and he recalled Weinberg’s office as walnut-paneled and full of old letters that impressed the young Buffett.

Then Weinberg put his arm around Buffett and asked him what stock he liked.

“He’d forgotten it all the next day,” Buffett says in the book, “but I remembered it forever.”

Except while he might not have forgotten the meeting, Buffett hasn’t always played nice with Wall Street.

Warren Buffett is on pace to get nearly 2% of Goldman thanks to the soaring value of the warrants he holds in the investment bank.

The bank and Berkshire Hathaway are amending their agreement from an investment Buffett made at the height of the financial crisis. The warrants Buffett got in the deal are sitting in lucrative territory, worth some $1.4 billion to him today if he were to cash them in for Goldman shares.

Under an amended pact, Berkshire won’t get the difference in dollars but in stock, putting him in line today to get some 9.3 million shares if the transaction were done at Monday’s closing price. That would be equal to about 1.9% of Goldman’s shares outstanding when Buffett’s new shares are added in.

A position close to 2% would put Buffett in line to be the No. 9 holder of Goldman, according to FactSet.

Meanwhile, the shares were rallying in premarket trading, putting the Oracle of Omaha in place to get even more.

Reading the proxy from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is always good for a chuckle.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

There’s something almost silly in the fact that Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, earns a salary of $100,000 at Berkshire—and then cuts a check for $50,000 to reimburse Berkshire for “minor items such as postage or phone calls that are personal.”

But no number is sillier than the $1,800 that board member Bill Gates was paid for his service to Berkshire last year.

The average board fees for companies in the S&P500 was around $241,000 in 2011, according to executive compensation experts at Equilar. So the fees paid by Berkshire are low no matter who’s cashing the check. But with Gates, $1,800 is especially small.

Forbes earlier this month estimated the Microsoft co-founder was worth $67 billion. That means his fees from Berkshire amount to 0.000003% of his net worth.

To put that in context, the average American family’s net worth is about $80,000. So $1,800 for Bill Gates is the equivalent of two-tenths of a cent for the average family.

Here we present to our readers the Berkshire Bear. He sports the latest in Berkshire fashion, a lime-green shirt and a painting hat from Benjamin Moore, a Berkshire property.

But don’t be deceived by his supportive appearance. This bear comes armed with tough questions for the octogenarian investor. Here are his primary queries, and he’ll be disappointed if Mr. Kass doesn’t step up with similar fare.

1. You’ve said that your eventual replacement will come from among Berkshire’s managers. This limits options for Berkshire in that all of the Berkshire managers are human. Would you consider hiring a bear to run a Berkshire unit? Can you be sure that your replacement will continue to invite bears to the meeting?

Warren Buffett and 3G Capital attempted to play tough with their buyout of ketchup-maker Heinz. But this time, they caved.

Associated Press

Just two days after offering $70 a share for the company, the investors’ banker told the company’s banker that the group “typically” doesn’t boost its price in deals and that it had no intentions of doing so here, according to a filing. That wouldn’t be surprising to Buffett followers, as he says Berkshire Hathaway rarely negotiates on price and has left deals in the past because its price wasn’t being accepted.

The Heinz filing says a Lazard banker told Centerview, which was representing Heinz’s board, that the investors “do not typically negotiate price after making an initial offer and did not expect to do so here, and that, accordingly, Heinz should not expect the Investors to increase the price they were willing to pay.”

But the buyout group had to negotiate with Nelson Peltz, once of the four directors Heinz named to its transaction committee to handle the deal.

Doug Kass is walking into the Lions’ Den and the lions want to hear his questions for Mufasa Buffett.

AFP/Getty Images

Berkshire Hathaway shareholders said Monday they are excited for Kass to spice up the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting by presenting tough questions to the famed Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger.

Kass and fellow newcomer Jonathan Brandt, an analyst at brokerage Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, will join insurance analyst Cliff Gallant of Nomura Securities on the panel. Buffett’s letter on Friday said the idea for a different analyst and a bear came about after shareholders asked for more variety at the meetings. Last year, Berkshire had only three financial analysts, including Gallant, at the meeting.

Buffett had a long-time relationship with Bill Ruane, one of the founders of Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb

Marcelo P. Lima, of investment fund Heller House LLC, said he’s attended the meeting but not the past few years because there can be “diminishing returns” from seeing Buffett asked the same questions year after year. He hoped Kass would add some specific Berkshire questions for the executives, not just broad market thoughts.

In particular, Lima said he hopes Kass will ask about whether Berkshire shares are getting their full value from the market or could be worth more if the conglomerate sold some of its assets, blasphemy for Buffett.

“My personal opinion is that Berkshire is probably worth a lot more broken up,” Lima said. “If you ask that, Charlie would probably faint and Buffett would act all defensive.”

Warren Buffett said Monday that Doug Kass, a hedge-fund manager who is selling Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. short, will be added to the panel of analysts who participate in the company’s annual meeting.

In an appearance on CNBC on Monday, Buffett said he’s found a Berkshire skeptic in Kass, the president of Seabreeze Partners Management Inc. and a frequent presence on CNBC. Buffett said Kass had expressed interest in the job after the letter came out Friday, but that he hadn’t told Kass about being picked for the role, so Kass would learn of his appointment via the announcement on CNBC.

“Of course i was as surprised as you!” Kass wrote in an email to Deal Journal after Buffett’s announcement.

On Twitter, he joked: ”Wow! I am going to Disneyland, I mean Omaha, Neb. to be the `credentialed bear.’”

About Deal Journal

Deal Journal is an up-to-the-minute take on the deals and deal makers that shape the landscape of Wall Street, including mergers and acquisitions, capital-raising, private equity and bankruptcy. In short, wherever money changes hands. Deal Journal is updated throughout each trading day with exclusive commentary, analysis, data, news flashes and profiles. The Wall Street Journal’s David Benoit is the lead writer, with contributions from other Journal reporters and editors. Send news items, comments and questions to deals@wsj.com.

Dealpolitik is Ronald Barusch's strategic look at deals currently making the headlines as well as the major forces at work in the deal-making world. He was a M&A lawyer with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom for over 30 years. He retired in 2010 after 25 years as a partner at the firm. Click here for his current and archived columns.